Despite the title, I don’t usually believe in conspiracies. Chemtrails, NASA hiding aliens’ corpses, Big Pharma spreading AIDS to sell drugs (or, vice-versa, hiding universal remedies) are just modern versions of angel visions and miraculous healings (if interested in the topic, have a look at Carl Sagan’s classic book “The Demon-Haunted World”). Still, reading Wynes and Nicolas’ recent article showing how the actions to reduce individual CO2 emissions having the highest potential are systematically missing from the ones listed in schoolbooks and government recommendations on climate change, I must confess that I had some bad toughs.

What are these actions and how Wynes and Nicolas found them? The two authors first compiled a literature review of several possible actions to reduce energy consumption and mitigate climate change through individual actions. Then, for each of them, they computed how much a person’s emissions would be reduced each year if adopted given the prevailing conditions and technology in various countries. Their results are summarised in the Figure below:

The figure shows that choosing to have fewer children, not having a car, and avoiding to fly (especially long-haul flights) are the most effective action to reduce individual emissions, with the first one that is at least 20 times more effective than anything else you can do. By looking a the figure, it is also clear that the usually promoted measures, say buying a hybrid car or changing your light bulbs, are among the least effective ones. In practice, a US citizen choosing to have one fewer child could reduce emissions over 100 times more than by replacing her/his gasoline car with a hybrid one and 1000 times more than by replacing all the house light bulbs with LED ones.

The authors took their analysis one step further and surveyed the actions promoted in Canadian textbooks and in information reports edited by the EU, USA, Canada and Australia governments. The surprising result was that these sources largely fail to mention the high-impact actions, while focusing their recommendations on the ones having the lowest potential for emission reduction.

That’s where the idea of a conspiracy started to germinate in my mind. By looking closer at the high- and low-impact action groups a pattern emerges: low-impact actions usually imply to buy new products (cars, light-bulbs, etc.), high-impact ones to avoid having, doing, or eating things (cars, flights, meat, etc.), which is not really surprising as “not doing” something reduces to zero the corresponding emissions while “doing it differently” can, at best, decrease them. And here’s the conspiracy. Governments’ main interest, after all, is to promote economic growth. The goal of companies (by definition) is to make money and grow. This is best achieved at the macro-scale by increasing population and consumption: but that’s exactly the opposite of what most high-impact measures will do. So better to forget them and promote lower-impact, economic-growth-enhancing ones. That’s the very idea of the green-economy after all!

Now a (second) confession: I don’t really believe that an explicit conspiracy exists, nor Wynes and Nicolas suggest that. Governments do promote economic growth, of course, but that’s just one of the strongest requests from the citizens. A recent Eurobarometer survey shows that the economic situation, public finance, and unemployment are among the top-5 issues for EU citizens (just after terrorism and immigration), while climate change only ranks 8th and the environment in general 10th. Limiting the family size or reducing meat consumption are very unpopular measures indeed, often contrasted by well-organised lobbies (think about religious groups, for instance). So why should democratic governments promote them against the will people? In short: no conspiracy, just democracy. What’s wrong in that?

The problem is that people’s will can be myopic and, more specifically, that the current policies won’t prevent a major increase of Earth’s average temperature (most likely 3°C or more above pre-industrial time). Nevertheless, high-impact unpopular measures are not promoted while the focus shifts to low-resistance ineffective alternatives. On the one hand, little is better than nothing: so better one more LED bulb than a failed attempt to promote vegan diets against the people’s will. On the other, doing low-cost action allows people to live better with their conscience (in psychological terms: to reduce their cognitive dissonance), which unfortunately prevents them to change their behaviour in more effective, but difficult, ways. These same people often accuse distant politicians or big corporations (or whatever your favourite target is) to conspire to defend their interests at the expenses of climate change. That’s easy to do and helps feel better. Much harder is to recognise that government and corporations may well try to influence the process, but individual choices are what really matters. And these are not easy to change.

In short, we are facing a world where choices at all levels tend to converge towards low-cost, ineffective measures to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Institutions, following the people’s will, seem to go along with that and have given up – if they ever tried – with the attempt to promote more effective actions. All basically hope that technological change will occur fast enough to fix things at an acceptable cost. Nevertheless, technology – although useful – cannot make miracles. At the end, all that reminds me too much of Garrett Hardin’s famous Tragedy of the Commons model where participants, each pursuing his/her best self-interest, end up destroying their commons (climate stability in our case). No conspiracy, but no nice prospect either!

During the Earth week, the English teacher asked all the kids in my son’s class to write some reflections concerning the current state of the environment. I discovered that (besides a few grammar mistakes) my fourteen-year-old son can write better than me! I post his essay below, so you’ll judge by yourself.

Our Environment

It’s more than 50 years since scientists has started talking about environmental threats caused by the increasing amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. These reflect heat radiation from the earth causing it to get warmer. This is called global warming. In this essay I want to discuss why it scares me and what you can do to avoid it getting too bad.

Whatever you say or think, global warming does exist. It’s impossible to deny the increase in temperature, drought and extreme weather conditions. You can’t even deny that it’s humans that are causing it. If you close your eyes and pretend that everything is normal you won’t be achieving anything but waiting until or planet becomes a lot worse.

The main reasons for letting out greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are fossils fuel being burned in cars and industries, forest being cut down or burned and cattle emitting methane. An important reason for such emissions increasing is the massive increase in the number of humans on Earth. More humans means more cars, more industries producing objects for the humans and more forest being cut down for growing crops or methane emitting cattle.

If you think that the greenhouse effect will only affect nature and not humans you are incredibly wrong. Increase in greenhouse gases causes a higher average temperature on the planet. This is especially important in areas close to deserts where a tiny increase in temperature can cause enough drought to destroy the whole vegetation. This does not only affect the animals in that area, all the humans living there will have to move or die. This will affect the people on the higher latitudes as well where incoming people will increase the population and push to the limits those countries resources as well. After a while, the planets temperature may become that high that sea water evaporates and dramatically increase the amount of greenhouse gases and therefore the temperature on earth. The earth will then face a new mass extinction which will eliminate most if not all the life on earth.

After having read the text above you might be thinking “This is horrible! Why aren’t all the politicians doing anything?!”. In that case it might be good to take a look at yourself. Who is eating methane emitting cattle? Who drives cars? Who buys objects made from cutting down forest? Who is making the population grow? Of course politicians can forbid cars, meat and reproduction. But who is not voting for politicians which are saying that you need to have an a little worse life for saving the environment in the future?

The answer is everyday people like you. It’s up to people to save the environment. And if the planet experiences another mass extinction caused by humans, well it’s the people’s fault.

Are you dreaming of a lost Golden Age? Are you sharing Rousseau’s view of a primeval state of nature blessed with peace and harmony? Do you believe that our ancestors lived in balance with nature? Sorry to break your romantic dream. Growing evidence pictures out a different story, one of widespread competition over resources and scarcity-induced conflict. Yesterday, and today.

The most common human story is neither balanced nor quiet. When prehistoric human groups colonised new, richer territories, a period of abundance usually followed. Unfortunately, far too often that produces to population growth and the consequent overexploitation of local resources, triggering a crisis leading to starvation and the need to move further away. The colonization of New Zealand by Polynesian people in the late 13th century, which led to the extinction of at least nine species of moa (large, wingless birds), perfectly represents this pattern. The same happened in many other Pacific islands where, when moving was no longer possible, groups declined or disappeared. When possible, the alternative to starvation was to steal resources from some more lucky neighbours, which often requires to chase them out of their land, or simply to kill them.

The same may have also happened on a much larger scale. A research I recently co-authored shows that human population dynamics in South America 9000 to 5000 years ago cannot be explained without taking into account widespread migration and conflict. What we did is simply to check the ability of two models to reproduce the continental population dynamics recently reported in a Nature paper. In the first, only local natural resources were exploited by human groups, while in the second they had the possibility to move to already occupied neighbouring areas in case of scarcity. The latter model was the only able to correctly reproduce the empirical data, with the logical conclusion that migration and conflict affected human demography at the scale of a whole continent long before globalization and long distance mass transport.

I obviously don’t like these solutions to what, ultimately, are resource scarcity problems. No sane person would. That does not make the study of environmental conflicts less important. Far too often we base our policies and proposed solutions to the problems of the world on an idealised picture of humans and their behaviour. Some blame ridiculous conspiracies (from reptilians to chemtrails) for all the bad they see. More often, weakly defined forces, such as capitalism or globalization, are pointed out. These seem only scapegoats to me. It does not matter if you base your policy on the assumption of socio-economic structures fully conditioning behaviour (Marxism) or on the one of human as perfectly-informed, fully-rational machines (macro-economics models). As long as these assumptions are wrong, your well-intentioned actions are doomed to failure.

Like it or not, the picture that emerges from rigorous research is that we are not noble savages, nor fallen angels. We are the product of blind evolutionary forces, just as any other living being. That may sound depressing. Still, I believe that the recent accumulation of serious knowledge on how human actually behave (and behaved) is invaluable. More than that, it is essential to build sustainable societies and institutions: something that may work with actual people, not only with an idealised picture of what we’d like to be.

The recently published 2016 Living Planet Report (LPR) edited by the WWF includes updated ecological footprint data bringing bad news to Sweden. The country is listed among the bad guys together with well-known polluters like the USA and Middle East oil-exporting countries. That, of course, in stark contrast with the common view of Sweden as a green, forest-covered country: a first-choice holiday destination for Europeans looking for natural scenery and wildlife. Being the ecological footprint a well known and scientifically recognised indicator, it cannot easily be dismissed as the last environmentalists’ paranoia. So where does this contrast come from?

Before answering that question, a few words are needed to explain what the LPR and the ecological footprint are. Although published by an environmental association, the LPR is not just another environmentalist pamphlet. The WWF has a serious history of collaboration with major scientists, and the LPR specifically includes the contributions of prestigious scientific institutions, such as the Zoological Society of London and the Stockholm Resilience Centre. The ecological footprint data themselves are not computed by the WWF but by an international think-tank called Global Footprint Network, which employs transparent and rigorous methods in their estimation. This makes the use of the ecological footprint indicator common in academic publications.

The ecological footprint indeed holds merits. It is designed as a consumption based indicator, which means that the environmental impact of a given good or service is attributed to the entity (individual, city, country, etc.) that benefits from its use, not to its producer. For instance, the impact of a mobile phone built in China but sold and used in Sweden will be attributed to the latter country not to China. This unlike other indicators − CO2 emissions, for instance − that point to the geographical area where the production process occurs. In synthesis, the ecological footprint estimates the overall burden placed on natural systems by the production, use and disposal of a given good or service and attributes it to the entity that actually used that good or service. Given sufficient data, it can be estimated at any scale: from the single individual to the whole planet.

Back to Sweden, the press release on the local WWF website explained the negative performance of the country as the result of a sustained consumption of imported goods, the need to heat large residential buildings, the prevailing fleet of big cars, and a high consumption of meat (I’d personally add the propensity to use disposable products even when easy alternatives exist). Unfortunately, disaggregated footprint data are not publicly available, which makes difficult to rigorously check these arguments. Still, data showing that they point out in the right direction exist. For instance, World Bank data show that Swedes imported goods for a total value of 137,625 millions of US dollars in 2015, which means over 14,000$ per habitant. As a comparison, consider that imports were valued 7200$ per person in the USA, 8600$ in France and 12,900$ in Germany. Similarly, international sales statistics report that cars sold in Sweden are among the largest and heaviest in Europe, with a correspondingly higher environmental impact from their production and use. Finally, meat consumption is indeed high in Sweden, although not at the world top, with science clearly showing that that lowering the consumption of meat and other animal products reduces environmental impact more than any other feasible action regarding food.

In short, Swedes really seem to consume too much to be sustainable, and possibly to hold bad consumption habits too. How does that fit with the fact that over two-thirds of the country territory are covered by forests or that the per capita CO2 emissions are lower than in most other European countries and less than one-third of the American ones? More generally, and in contrast with the picture above, Sweden holds one of the top position in Yale University’s Environmental Performance Index, which ranks the world countries based on more than 20 indicators of ecosystem vitality and environmental health.

The reliance on imported goods plays a role in explaining this discrepancy. Importing a high share of the consumed goods effectively means exporting environmental impact, like in the mobile phone example.This is considered in the ecological footprint analysis but not in other international statistics. However, the displacement of environmental impact is only part of the story. After all, Sweden is a large exporter of raw materials and manufactured goods too, with a corresponding impact on the country ecosystems. Although Sweden, as other advanced countries, has become more efficient in its use of natural resources in recent years, most of the merit for the good quality of the country environment actually derive from the fact that a large biocapacity reserve is still available in the country.

Biocapacity is an indicator that measures the supply of natural services, just as the ecological footprint measures the demand. It is estimated together with the ecological footprint and a comparison between the two allows to check whether a country could be sustainable should it rely on its territory alone (which, in practice, never happens because of the import/export of goods and services). Sweden has a biocapacity higher than its footprint and the resulting “reserve” explains how it is possible to have an exceedingly high level of consumption and a good environmental quality at the same time.

Unfortunately, what is possible for somebody is not necessarily possible for everyone. While the biocapacity available for the Swedes is about 11 gha/cap., the one for the average human is less than 2 gha/cap. This is not much a matter of ecological productivity, as tropical ecosystems are usually more productive than boreal ones, but of population density. Sweden has a population density of about 24 people per square kilometre, the world as a whole a density of 57 p./km2, most high-income countries vary between 93 p./km2 (Spain) and 503 p./km2 (The Netherlands). The biocapacity also vary for biological reasons (forests and wetlands are more productive than pastures and deserts) but the population density is the main factor explaining the differences among countries.

The world as a whole has experienced a per person biocapacity decline in the last 50 years. That not because the total biocapacity has actually decreased, although part of the productivity has shifted from natural systems to agricultural environments, but because human population has constantly grown in this period (and will continue to grow at least until the end of this century, following the last UN population prospects). The current ecological deficit hence seems to be more the product of the constant decline of the available per person biocapacity than of the increase in the average ecological footprint, which actually peaked in the mid 1970s and has remained approximatively stable afterwards.

Sweden still holds some biocapacity reserve despite a high per capita footprint because of its low population density. Still, the population has increased by 30% since the 1960s and the per person biocapacity has reduced accordingly. As the population increase is projected to continue until the end of the century, the country may eventually reach the red area of the ecological deficit as well.

To conclude, Swedes live in a nice country because they are few, not because their behaviour is especially sustainable. Despite a relatively efficient resource use, their high level of consumption put them close to the top in terms of pressure on the global natural systems. The country remains green and pleasant partially because of the displacement of its environmental impact but mainly thanks to its low population density. Unfortunately, most of the times its inhabitants do not seem to realise it.

Since quite a long time I have tough about holding a blog on sustainability issues. The temptation was strong. I have worked with natural resource management and people behaviour since almost 20 years now, and I think I have something to say! However, so many sources of information (and misinformation) already exist, and the question clearly become whether I can add something meaningful to the debate.

Since I’m writing this, I obviously decided that the answer should be yes. Too often the debate on environmental issues takes a partisan, when not ideological, stand. Scientific evidence is misused, ignored (if it just does not conform to the speaker’s beliefs) and mixed with any sort of arguments from unchecked and unreliable sources. That clearly does not help the public and the decision makers to take the sometimes difficult choices they face in order to provide both us and the future generations with an healthier economy, society and environment. In short, the more the debate is biased the less likely becomes to find a sustainable path for a decent human development on this planet.

What I hope to contribute here is a discussion and clarification of important themes – like climate change, biodiversity loss, resource shortages, etc. – and of their drivers – growth in population and consumption, wrong technological choices, etc. – based on the best-available scientific evidence rather than on arbitrary beliefs based on some obscure online source. I’ll also try to comment news and scientific breakthroughs on environmental issues. There are so many that the only problem will be to select them.

Clearly, I don’t posses the truth and I‘ll be sometimes wrong in my judgements and arguments. In other words, I cannot promise to be always reliable and fool-proof in what I wrote. What I can promise is to select reliable sources of information and to make clear references to them, so that the reader will be able to trace back my arguments. I can also promise to revise them whenever significant contradicting facts are advanced. After all, that’s what we all should do, what science does when at its best, and what the rest of the society unfortunately almost never does.